Technical Field
This disclosure concerns video monitoring systems and methods used to monitor scenes, in particular home scenes, for example to monitor what may happen at home when people a at work, or away from home.
Description of the Related Art
In the known art, one or more video cameras are placed in a location or premises; such video cameras are configured to send images to a control computer having a mass storage unit and coupled to one or more video monitors video cameras are configured to capture images (or video clips) either permanently or upon movement detection triggering.
In some case, there is a human operator looking in real time at the video monitors, like in surveillance systems for department stores or other public premises.
However, in many cases, the captured images (or video clips) are not watched in real time, but in a delayed manner. One of such example is a private home video monitoring system; in this case, one or more video cameras are placed in home room(s), and images are captured and stored at least when the inhabitants are not present at home; later in the day or the day(s) after, the images are played back and watched by the owner or tenant of the home. As known, this requires high memory spaces to store images and furthermore the play back and reviewing procedure is time consuming.
There have been attempts to reduce the required size of stored images by compressing images, however this entails a loss in quality and possibly blurred images. Also, in order to review rapidly the captured images/videos, it is proposed fast forward reading, but this entails a risk of missing an important event.
Therefore, there is a need to bring new solutions to optimize video monitoring systems, especially for private home video monitoring systems, as per capture and replay of images.